Getting to Know: Thomas Robinson, AIA Idaho Juror Why did you become an architect? I was interested in design from a young age because of a house my great-grandfather built in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. My interest in architecture is an outgrowth of that. The house is on the southwest corner of Cape Cod. He used timber harvested from Oregon in 1928. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C., but I would come to his house in the summer. It was a very small, simple house. I always admired its materiality and the craft that had gone into putting it together. The wood wasn’t finished, and you could see the fingerprints of the people who had put it together. I liked how it felt to be there. You studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University Graduate School of Design. What was the most important thing you learned at either or both schools? The two schools had different approaches, and I got a lot out of my time at both. I was fortunate to be at Berkeley, which had incredible and brilliant professors. My education there was focused on the arts and design. During my first semester, all we did was hand drawings. It was just a pencil on paper, and you never had a straight edge. We studied art, aesthetics, composition, drawing and sculpture. There was also a great building sciences department where the professors focused on subjects such as daylighting, sustainability and indoor air quality. After Berkeley, I worked for several years, and I was licensed before I went back to the design school at Harvard. That experience opened my eyes to a broader, more international world of architecture. People all over the world gave lectures. One of the most amazing experiences I had there was with Peter Zumthor, who wasn’t as famous then as now. That was a highlight of my graduate school experience. Meeting him led me to move to Basel, Switzerland, with my wife. I worked at Herzog & de Meuron for three years. What something is made of always interests us, and we design buildings around material characteristics. We leverage material to do even better what it can already do really well. 26 AIA IDAHO ARCHITECTURE | 2022-23 | aiaidaho.com AIA Idaho Awards Jurors: Thomas Robinson, Faith Rose, Ben Waechter
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